Chapter 40 Arthur
Arthur
The smell of burgers filled the cab of the truck as we drove up the mountain, the outside world passing in a peripheral blur of deep pine green.
Izzy cranked up the radio and wound down the windows as we drove, content to let conversation slough away.
She swayed with the music and belted out the lyrics she knew, and some others she clearly didn’t.
I couldn’t help but smile.
When we passed through Audrey’s single, blinking stoplight, my eyes snagged on the old white chapel. I leaned forward. “Iz?” I asked softly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we stop here?”
She eyed me curiously as she pulled off to the side of the road just in front of the battered church.
I pressed my eyes shut and gathered a breath.
Only days ago, I would have sworn that I never wanted to see this building again.
I’d thought there was nothing I wanted to remember tucked behind its walls.
Before I could second-guess the tug pulling me forward, I unbuckled my seat belt and slipped out. The chapel had felt bigger to me when I was seventeen. Now it just felt quiet, not at all the beast it had become in memory, but wounded in the way of old abandoned places.
I quickened my step. If I could just see the pews, the rafters, the place where everything had changed… if I could just see it, maybe the shadow of this place would stop looming over me.
I pushed inside, surprised to find the door unlocked. Izzy followed a few steps behind. Her presence was lightweight, a comfort I didn’t realize I’d needed. She didn’t ask questions or watch me too closely, instead turning her eyes up in curiosity.
“There’s a nest up there,” she said, squinting.
“Sure is.” I didn’t have to check to know the species. Even if the last time I looked up into these rafters hadn’t been burned into my memory, their familiar call would have sent a chill along my skin. “Starlings.”
The stark emptiness within struck me as odd, though really, what had I expected to find?
A wilderness of moss-covered wallpaper, with lichen riming the pulpit and flowers spilling across the pews?
Time and someone’s obvious attention had worked here as it had on me, clearing out a mass of detritus and leaving it once again fresh and clean.
The walls of the chapel had been scrubbed, the floors swept and weeds pulled out of the cracks.
It was strangely cold, pale as bone, and eerily sterile.
A dead place.
“It took a while to clean out the garden she made,” Izzy mused, drawing a fingertip over a layer of dust on the back of a bench.
I looked at her. “You cleaned it up?”
She gave me a strange look. “Who else?”
I didn’t think the question was intended as a barb, but it did hold weight.
“Can I ask you something?” Izzy said. I nodded. “Why did you come back to us? I know, I know, you wanted to bring your mom’s ashes here,” she said, waving the reason away before I could give it, as though it wasn’t enough. As though she knew there was something more.
I’d thought I’d come to appease the monster and regain some control of my mind. But now? “I… don’t know.”
Izzy cocked her head. “I think you do.”
I thought of the monster’s gnawing hunger that had pushed me into the woods time and time again, looking for something neither one of us had ever been able to find.
I thought of the way it had pushed me out of my own head, taking lives to keep me going, deer and bird and badger.
So many flowers. So many trees. I wasn’t a hunter, but I felt like one all the same, with the taste of hides and hearts locked under my tongue.
I hadn’t wanted to lose myself. That’s why I’d come back, or at least it was part of it. Death was an endless slope, and I was so tired of climbing that hill. I just wanted peace again. I wanted—
“To live,” I said. The confession felt like a weight, handed over. I was almost dizzy from it. “I wanted to live again.”
Izzy nodded, a smile crimping the sides of her mouth. “Do you know how scion cuts work, Fairy?”
I blinked. “Scion cuts? Like, in tree grafting?”
Izzy nodded. “They don’t just help the scion survive.
Both the rootstock and the plant cutting join together and become something new.
” She shifted to face me more fully as she put a hand on her hip.
“Love is like that too. You don’t pay it back.
It transforms everyone it touches, so that rootstock and graft can grow into something better than before. ”
I let out a breath, words spoken long ago whispering softly in my ear. Home is a thing that grows. “You know, Eva said something like that to me once.”
“’Bout time you listen, then, isn’t it?” Izzy cocked her head toward the door. “Let’s go. I have a bag of crinkle-cut fries with my name on it.”
It was a short walk back to the truck. To my surprise, instead of turning onto the road that would lead up to the Moreau farm, Izzy pulled up to the neighboring Walker farmhouse. When she put on the brakes, I turned to her with a frown. “What are we doing here?”
“Dane’s got enough spare rooms for us all,” she said. “And don’t worry. We’ll figure out what happens next, you know, with the whole breaking out of jail thing. He wants to help.”
I didn’t relish that conversation, but her response hadn’t exactly answered my question.
“But… why aren’t we staying at the cottage?”
“Oh!” Izzy cut in. “You don’t know!”
“Know what?”
She bit her lip as she extricated herself from the vehicle, a brown paper sack full of our food tucked under her arm.
“So much has happened,” she murmured, her heels clicking over the pavement.
She tried to use her hip to nudge the front door open.
“The cottage isn’t… Well, this is a little hard to explain. ”
I followed, grabbing the door and widening it for her. The two of us slipped inside. I blinked, struck by the sudden rush of AC. “The cottage isn’t what?”
“Well.” She set down the bags. “It’s not exactly there anymore.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning.
“Do you think Dad and Eva would be upset if we ate without them?” Izzy tossed a fry into her mouth. “I can’t imagine they’re far behind us, but it feels like a sin to let these get cold.”
“Isobel,” I begged.
I’d never said her full name before. I hadn’t thought it would feel natural, but in my frustration it had rolled off my tongue, and to my surprise, it fit.
She sighed. “Come on. I’ll show you.”